The John Updike Audio Collection Audio Book

The John Updike Audio Collection
Author: John Updike
Readers: John Updike, Jane Alexander, and Edward Herrmann

Thirteen extraordinarily evocative stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author chronicle all the telling moments in the joy and pain of life. Includes Killing, The Family Meadow, The Orphaned Swimming Pool, A&P, Gesturing, Snowing in Greenwich Village, Bulgarian Poetess, The Persistence of Desire, The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals, Lifeguard, Your Lover Just Called, Ace in the Hole, and Pigeon Feathers. "Sterling performances."—AudioFile   » Read More

The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.

In describing how he wrote these stories in a small, rented, smoke-filled office in Ipswitch, Massachusetts, he says, "I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me -- to give the mundane its beautiful due."